do not be drinking anything.

[erastes]

You have been warned.

Cultural Appropriation by Yakalskovich

http://yakalskovich.livejournal.com/459398.html

Yes, I’m now addicted to Dexter. Loved season one – on to season two. Sad Debbie didn’t get diced and sliced though.

I thought I was going to be disgusted with myself for doing nothing yesterday. I even thought at the time, I’m going to regret this sloth.

Not that sloth.

But no, I don’t. My body literally said “REST, DAMN IT” and I took notice. After lunch I could no more have sat upright than flown to the moon  I spent the day horizontal, covered in cats and watching season one of Dexter. Today I feel pretty good, my brain is alert and when I finish procrastinating here, I’ll get on with the editing.

Two bits of news that are interesting but not fully formed and I’m waiting to see what happens – apparently some scientist has “cured” someone of HIV, but I don’t know if this is true, or bunkum—surely it would be all over the news if the former… And a bill has been passed in the USA to get rid of DADT. I’m not holding my breath over that one either, but both could be good news—so I’ll wait and see.

 

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Comments

[eglantine-br.livejournal.com]

DADT has passed the House. It still has to go through the Senate. I hope it can pass there, but fear it will not.

They have unyoked it from other bills, and made it a stand alone. This is because everyone doubts that it will make it past Senate Republicans, and they don't want to tank things attatched to it. This is a bad sign.

[gehayi.livejournal.com]

Welll...sort of. The House of Representatives voted Wednesday to overturn the ban on openly gay and lesbian soldiers serving in the U.S. military, passing legislation repealing the controversial "don't ask, don't tell" policy. It passed 250 to 175, BTW.

But the bill now has to go to the Senate for a vote. And if it passes there, the President has to sign it for it to become a law.

*singing*: And I hope and I pray that he will/But today it is still just a bill.

As for the AIDS cure...it's not really a cure. A guy with leukemia and HIV was given a bone marrow transplant from someone who has a natural immunity to the AIDS virus. So now, three years later, he's cured of leukemia and doesn't have any HIV-affected cells...though the virus could still be lurking in his system.

So not a cure, though it does open up avenues of investigation for the future.

[erastes.livejournal.com]

LOL - I can't believe you've given me links to something I've just posted about !!!!!

:)

[gehayi.livejournal.com]

Well, the media is likely to muddle "bills passing in the House of Representatives (or the U.S. Senate)" with "bills passing both houses, being signed and becoming law," and what you said sounded like the repeal of DADT had passed overall. And you were a bit vague about the "AIDS cure," so I went looking to see what had happened. I was expecting something to show up on Snopes.com, frankly--one more Internet scam that was exploiting hope and pain.

[erastes.livejournal.com]

*baffled* but I'm not "media" - and I do know the difference. I assume people will too or will go and look it up. Not my job to teach people the intricacies of political workings.

So sorry I was vague!!!!

[lovefromgirl.livejournal.com]

The good news is that it looks like the closest thing to a cure we can currently achieve has been achieved, but using a treatment that's just as likely to kill you as cure you. Stem cell/bone marrow transplants in cancer patients do wonderful things, but they take significant time and even more significant good luck. HIV, frankly, is easier to live with than the aftermath of a transplant: your immune system is just as shot, but now you have to fret about your new cells causing graft vs host disease. Until they've taken over your old cells, you also still have HIV. You've just got a double whammy of immunodeficiency due to the drugs you'll be on.

The patient in question had acute myeloid leukemia, for which the transplant was the treatment; scientists did not set out to experiment on him. This "cure" came about quite by accident, and I believe it is unethical to attempt the same in patients who are less desperately ill than that patient.

[alex-beecroft.livejournal.com]

I'm glad to hear you're feeling better. Sometimes the very best thing you can do really is nothing at all :)

[yakalskovich]

Oooh! Thanks for pimping my post!

[lee-rowan.livejournal.com]

I've heard reports of a handful of people who were HIV+ being tested negative at a later time; one report was from a male nurse who knew the man who went negative after a native American healing ceremony, another from an article in an alternative-health journal written by the woman who switched back--and in both cases, the official verdict was "incorrect original diagnosis," though in the second case the documentation on her AIDS was extensive.

Viruses are tough, and they mutate, and HIV had a decade while nobody did anything because it was just a 'gay disease.'

I'm not hopeful about DADT, there are too many homophobic closet cases in the Senate who ought to be outed. But getting it throug the House was something--that would not have happened at all ten years ago.